President Philip E. Austin, left, and Bahram
Javidi, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Javidi's
lab in the ITE Building.

Photo by Peter Morenus

Bahram Javidi, Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, has been named the 2005 recipient of the
Dennis H. Gabor Award.

Javidi received the award from the International Society for Optical Engineering.
It is presented annually in recognition of outstanding accomplishments in diffractive
wavefront technologies, especially those that further the development of electro-optical
systems (including information optics), holography, and metrology applications.

Javidi won the award for his contributions in the areas of optical information
systems, electro-optical security systems, digital holographic systems,
and three-dimensional display.

Named after the late physicist Dennis Gabor, winner of a Nobel Prize in 1971
for the invention of holography, the award is the highest honor and most
prestigious prize of the society
in this field.

Robert Magnusson, professor and head of electrical and computer engineering,
said the honor “shines a bright light on the ECE department, the School of
Engineering, and on
our University.”

Javidi’s research includes using lasers or conventional light sources to photograph
objects, which are then reconstructed and displayed as 3-D images. The data can
be stored and manipulated for various applications, including image sensing and
recognition. Three-dimensional imaging – which mimics human vision – may
be an important tool for homeland security, medicine and the military.

Javidi is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
(IEEE), the Optical Society of America, and the International Society for Optical
Engineering.

Early in his career, the National
Science Foundation named him a Presidential Young Investigator. He received
the IEEE Lasers and Electro-optics Society Distinguished Lecturer Award in 2003
and 2004, and was recipient of the IEEE Best Journal Paper Award from IEEE Transactions
on Vehicular Technology in 2002.

Author of several books, he has also published more than 180 technical articles
in major journals and more than 220 conference proceedings. His papers have been
cited 2,400 times according to the citation index of Web of Science.